NSA Says They Have VPNs In a 'Vulcan Death Grip'

An anonymous reader sends this quote from Ars Technica: The National Security Agency's Office of Target Pursuit (OTP) maintains a team of engineers dedicated to cracking the encrypted traffic of virtual private networks (VPNs) and has developed tools that could potentially uncloak the traffic in the majority of VPNs used to secure traffic passing over the Internet today, according to documents published this week by the German news magazine Der Speigel. A slide deck from a presentation by a member of OTP's VPN Exploitation Team, dated September 13, 2010, details the process the NSA used at that time to attack VPNs—including tools with names drawn from Star Trek and other bits of popular culture.

Comments

Re: What IP address ranges are in the US?

[bragr]

That is harder than you'd think. A surprising amount of data ends up going through the US. A lot of the EU-Asia traffic ends up going through the US as the indian ocean routes are relatively slow, and AFAIK Russia hasn't built any extensive cross continent fiber networks.

Re:What IP address ranges are in the US?

[gatkinso]

My guess is that you overlooked the "USA, AUS, CAN, GBR, NZL" at the top of the slides.